Plotinus: The First Philosopher of the Unconscious

Plotinus is sometimes referred to as “the first philosopher of the unconscious.” In his 1960 essay “Consciousness and Unconsciousness in Plotinus,” Hans Rudolph Schwyzer called Plotinus “the discoverer of the unconscious.” What exactly was Plotinus’ unconscious? In the Enneads, Plotinus asks about soul and intellect: “Why then…do we not consciously grasp them…? For not everything which is in the soul is immediately perceptible” (V.1.12.1–15).[i] In the De anima of Aristotle, “Mind does not think intermittently” (430a10–25).[ii]We cannot remember eternal mind in us, because passive mind is perishable. Is the productive or active intelligence in our mind that of which we are not conscious? Can productive intelligence be compared to unconscious thought? Plotinus suggests that we do not notice the activity of intellect because it is not engaged with objects of sense perception. The intellect must involve an activity prior to awareness. Awareness of intellectual activity only occurs when thinking is reflected as in a mirror, but knowledge in discursive reason, reason transitioning from one object to the next in a temporal sequence, is not self-knowledge. Only in the activity of intellect inaccessible to discursive reason is thinking as the equivalent of being. The intellectual act in mind is only apprehended when it is brought into the image-making power of mind through the logos or linguistic articulation; “we are always intellectually active but do not always apprehend our activity” (IV.3.30.1–17). If the Intellectual is the unconscious, then unconscious reason is superior to conscious reason. The inability of conscious reason to know itself in the illusion of self-consciousness is the premise of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century

Philosophy of Intellect and Vision in the De anima of Themistius

Themistius (317–c. 387) was born into an aristocratic family and ran a paripatetic school of philosophy in Constantinople in the mid-fourth century, between 345 and 355. He made use of Alexander’s De anima in his commentary on the De anima of Aristotle, which is considered to be the earliest surviving commentary on Aristotle’s work, as Alexander’s commentary itself did not survive. Themistius may also have been influenced by Plotinus, and Porphyry (232–309), whom he criticizes. Themistius refers often to works of Plato, especially the Timaeus, and attempts a synthesis of Aristotle and Plato, a synthesis which was continued in the Neoplatonic tradition. As it has been seen in Alexander that thought and perception are intimately connected, almost identical, Themistius goes to much greater length to differentiate the two. Sense perception must be distinguished from reasoning, because all animals are capable of sense perception, while only humans are capable of reasoning; while there are only five kinds of sense perception, there are many varieties of the capacity for reasoning; and the functions of sense perception and reasoning can be differentiated

Philosophy of Intellect and Vision in the De anima and De intellectu of Alexander of Aphrodisias

Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. 198–209) was born somewhere around 150, in Aphrodisia on the Aegean Sea. He began his career in Alexandria during the reign of Septimius Severus, was appointed to the peripatetic chair at the Lyceum in Athens in 198, a post established by Marcus Aurelius, wrote a commentary on the De anima of Aristotle, and died in 211. According to Porphyry, Alexander was an authority read in the seminars of Plotinus in Rome. He is the earliest philosopher who saw the active intellect implied in Book III of the De anima of Aristotle as transcendent in relation to the material intellect. He connected the active intellect with the incorporeal and eternal cause of the universe described by Aristotle in Book XII of the Metaphysics. Plotinus would make a similar connection, between the One as First Cause and the Intellectual in which it participates

Plotinus and the Artistic Imagination

In the thought of Plotinus, the imagination is responsible for the apprehension of the activity of Intellect. If creativity in the arts involves an exercise of the imagination, the image-making power that links sense perception to noetic thought and the nous poietikos, the poetic or creative intellect, then the arts exercise the apprehension of intellectual activity. According to John Dillon in “Plotinus and the Transcendental Imagination,” Plotinus’ conception of the imagination led to the formulation of the imagination as a basis of artistic creativity. In Plotinus, imagination operates on several different levels: it produces images in sense perception, it synthesizes images in dianoetic thought, and it produces images in correspondence with the articulation through logos of noetic thought. The imagination is what connects the intelligible in intellect and the form in sense perception. Plotinus imagines an art which is a product of noetic thought as made possible by the imagination. The primary principle of beauty is Intellect, from which all images should be taken, as facilitated by imagination. Forms of art, like the forms of nature, are the product of Intellect. The production of a work of art is an intellectual or spiritual exercise of the imagination that allows apprehension of Intellect and noesis in nous poietikos. All art is metaphysical, and is an expression of intelligible form in imagination, an expression of an intellectual idea that can be differentiated from sensible form in intellectual apprehension. There are many ways in which the tenets of the thought of Plotinus become currents of art and aesthetic theory as it develops to the present day

Narrative as construction and discursive resource

Discursive psychologists (Edley, 2001; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell, 1998) have analysed identity work in talk, including the ways in which understandings which prevail in a wider social context are taken up or resisted as speakers position themselves and are positioned by others. In these terms, a narrative is generally understood in two ways. The first is as an established understanding of sequence or consequence, such as a potential life trajectory, which becomes a discursive resource for speakers to draw on (cf. Bruner’s ‘canonical narratives’, 1991). The second is of a narrative as a situated construction, such as the biography produced by a speaker within a particular interaction. In this article, I propose an expanded analytic focus which considers how the versions of a biographical narrative produced in previous tellings become resources for future talk, thus setting constraints on a reflexive speaker’s work to construct a coherent identity across separate interactions and contexts (Taylor & Littleton, forthcoming)

Dealing with a traumatic past: the victim hearings of the South African truth and reconciliation commission and their reconciliation discourse

In the final years of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been a worldwide tendency to approach conflict resolution from a restorative rather than from a retributive perspective. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), with its principle of 'amnesty for truth' was a turning point. Based on my discursive research of the TRC victim hearings, I would argue that it was on a discursive level in particular that the Truth Commission has exerted/is still exerting a long-lasting impact on South African society. In this article, three of these features will be highlighted and illustrated: firstly, the TRC provided a discursive forum for thousands of ordinary citizens. Secondly, by means of testimonies from apartheid victims and perpetrators, the TRC composed an officially recognised archive of the apartheid past. Thirdly, the reconciliation discourse created at the TRC victim hearings formed a template for talking about a traumatic past, and it opened up the debate on reconciliation. By discussing these three features and their social impact, it will become clear that the way in which the apartheid past was remembered at the victim hearings seemed to have been determined, not so much by political concerns, but mainly by social needs

‘What’s it like to have ME?’ The discursive construction of ME in computer-mediated communication and face-to-face interaction

ME/CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome) is a debilitating illness for which no cause or medical tests have been identified. Debates over its nature have generated interest from qualitative researchers. However, participants are difficult to recruit because of the nature of their condition. Therefore, this study explores the utility of the internet as a means of eliciting accounts. We analyse data from focus groups and the internet in order to ascertain the extent to which previous research findings apply to the internet domain. Interviews were conducted among 49 members of internet (38 chatline, 11 personal) and 7 members of two face-to-face support groups. Discourse analysis of descriptions and accounts of ME/CFS revealed similar devices and interactional concerns in both internet and face-to-face communication. Participants constructed their condition as serious, enigmatic and not psychological. These functioned to deflect problematic assumptions about ME/CFS and to manage their accountability for the illness and its effects

Fear appeal construction in the Daily Mail Online:a critical discourse analysis of ‘Prime Minister Corbyn and the 1000 days that destroyed Britain’

The rhetorical fear appeal is a technique of political communication that seeks to elicit an emotional response in receivers with the intention of provoking them to political action desired by the rhetor. This paper examines a single example of fear appeal construction in the British press, the Mail Online’s ‘Prime Minister Corbyn and the 1000 days that Destroyed Britain’ (2015), through analysis of its use of two defining political myths, a conservative myth of declinism, and the utopia/anti-utopia binary myth. I firstly examine the origins and contemporary uses of fear appeals as techniques of political persuasion, before going on to examine how these are constructed. I then go on to analyse the Mail Online article’s use of these two powerful political myths, one, declinism, which I argue is utilised descriptively for the purposes of discourse construction, and the other, utopia/anti-utopia, which is utilised instructively. Finally, I propose a method of analysis combining recent approaches to the critical discourse analysis of myth with the cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion drawn from social psychology, in order to show how the Mail Online article is constructed as a discursive fear appeal